This is probably the finest book on the American Revolution published in the second half of the twentieth century. No-one can truly claim to understand the Revolution without having read this book in its entirety. In it, Mr. Bailyn gives a full and thorough analysis of the causes and perceptions of the Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. The politics, journalism, and thought of the time are all carefully scrutinized and both painstakingly and wittily described. Seldom has one book so completely altered the understanding of a period as has The Idealogical Origins.

This book is one of the best books I have ever read on the subject matter of American Revolutionary thought. Bailyn masterfully synthesises the source material to show the influences and assumptions the founding fathers and people of america were working under. He shows how they essentially took the thought process of the previous 100 years of English thought to the next logic conclusion for their situation. He shows how they didn't break from the past but harnessed it to their needs. Of course, the other large conclusion one takes from the book is just how much the thoughts behind the revolution were affected by Enlightenment thought: Montesqui, Locke, the ancient romans, and how little christianity influenced it in any substantive way. The obvious 'flaw' of this book is how it essentially ignores the questions of socio-economics and of how the founding fathers 'betrayed' their ideals on the question of slavery. But, I would contend that both are outside the realm of the argument. Socio-economics are obviously important but do not explain the forms that ideology take. and the betrayel of slavery is essentially a story of the constitution and the great sectional compromise, not of revolutionary idealogy. All in all, an excellent source of what our founding fathers were thinking when they founded the country.

When published in the 1960s, this book had a revolutionary effect on our understanding of the American Revolution. Its impact is undiminished by the passage of the last 40 years. Bailyn's scholarship and exposition remains as exciting as it must have been at the time of initial publication. Bailyn attempted to take a fresh look at the thinking of the individuals who made the Revolution. His work was based on an extensive survey and analysis of the large number of political pamphlets published in the years leading up to the revolution. His work benefited as well greatly from a number of other significant works of scholarship, such as Caroline Robbins' book on the Commonwealth tradition in 18th century thought. More than anything else, Bailyn succeeded in determining what key terms like 'power', 'liberty', and republicanism meant to the Revolutionary generations. In doing so, he was able to strip away anachronistic accretions from these terms and ideas and recover the actual thinking of the Revolutionaries and their opponents.

Bailyn's achievement is manifold. He was able to show that dominant intellectual influence on the Revolutionaries was a compound of classical models, Common Law legal tradition, Enlightenment ideology, covenant theology, and a strong tradition of British intellectual and political dissent that had its roots in the Commonwealth period of the 17th century. The latter tradition was especially important and acted as the binding matrix for other traditions and interpretative lens through which other received ideas were focused. Bailyn shows how these ideas were articulated in the specifically American context and how they led inevitably to confrontation with the expanding imperial authority of Britain. This conflict led to new expansions of the basic ideology, some of which would represent completely novel ideas. The traditional ideas of representation and consent, constitutional basis of society, and sovereignty were overthrown and replaced to a very large extent by the concepts we still uphold.

The development of these new ideas and the necessity to give them practical scope would lead to what Bailyn artfully termed "The Contagion of Liberty"; the expansion of concepts of rights and freedom well beyond the original categories of thought received by the Revolutionary generations. These would include attacks on slavery, the questioning of establishment of religion, speculation about democracy as a legitimate and potentially stable form of government, and an increasing emphasis on social equality generated from the realization of political equality. As Bailyn remarks, the thinking and writing on these topics provides the bridge between the world of the 18th century intellectuals and what would become the world of Madison and de Toqueville.

Bailyn's analysis and scholarship are superb. The organization and quality of writing in this book are outstanding. Just as important, Bailyn is very good at supporting his analysis with well chosen excerpts from contemporary political pamphlets. His judicious choice of quotations not only serves to support his conclusions but gives a fine idea of the words and thoughts of the Revolutionaries and their opponents.

This is a fundamental book for understanding the American past.

Unlike the political commentators of the late 20th and early 21st century (watchers of Sunday public affairs programs and AM radio know who they are), the commentators of the 18th century actually had something of substance to say. This was a time when education was rare, but when done was done well. The New American Library does its usual exceptional job in assembling the material in this book including some of the more important selections from the Federalist Papers as well as some of the writings of the anti-Federalists. Here the role of the government and the nature of freedom are really explored. Life was better before politics became about feeling and emotion. Every American should read this book, but only if he wants to really understand the basis of the American experiment.

Study of the Federalist Papers, of course included in this two volume series, is a conduit for understanding the American ethic. When the Federalist Papers are viewed as included in this chronological deliberation between the Federalists and Antifederalists, they become even more profound than the enormous depth they can achieve when read alone. The concerns of Brutus and Agrippa are answered, the repititive call for a 'Bill of Rights' revealed. Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1825 defining the Federalist Papers as 'may fairly enough be regarded as the most authentic exposition of the text of the federal constituion, as understood by the Body which prepared & the authority which accepted it.' The enormous insight gained from tracking the arguments and concerns of the proposed Constituion , and the responses of the Federalist cannot be easily estimated, yet the result is a much more informed conscience of the American experience. Madison in the same letter mentioned above stated that Federalist Essays did not foresee all the misconstructions which to that date had occured, nor prevent some it did foresee. For the concerned and deliberate citizen of today many of these issues remain, issues such as Federalism are current topics and all too often the opinions of the few become the conscience of the many, examining these volume will do much to alleviate this vexing condition. More alarming is the realization that many of the fears of the Antifederalists have become a reality in todays polity. An excellent and comprehensive collection thank you Bernard Bailyn.

Editor Bernard Bailyn has assembled a first-rate collection of letters, circulars, pamphlets, speeches, and what would be the colonial equivalent of modern op-ed pieces that allows today's readers to witness the founding of a government through the eyes of (and with the voices of) those who were really there. But don't be fooled into thinking this is going to be the stilted, polite prose that often belongs to 18th century philosophers or debaters. Many of the pieces Bailyn has selected are remakrkably spry and teeming with understated wit.

Those who think that mud-slinging, negative campaigning, and assaults on the integrity of the opponent are modern day creations may be surprised to see that those in the 18th century could be just as nitpicky, petty, and ascerbic as their present day decendants -- and yet still remain surprisingly gentlemanly about the whole thing. Some letter writers absolutely seethe with irritation at their opposition, and by presenting his debaters in roughly chronological order, Bailyn ensures that for every "Oh yeah?" uttered by a Federalist, there will soon be a responsive "Yeah!" from the anti-Federalist side. It all makes for lively and informative reading, and one wonders if such a critical debate could be carried out with such manners in today's media.

It should come as no surprise that most of the Hamilton-Madison-Jay Federalist Papers are in here, as are the level-headed, persuasive anti-Federalist arguments of James Wilson and George Mason. But the real jewels in these volumes lie in the thoughtful and frank correspondence that passed back and forth between not only the Major Players, but also between some of the lesser-known writers, who make their cases for or against the Constitution with genuine passion and conviction.

Bailyn wisely leaves the spin to the writers themselves, but when he does step in, Bailyn is a most helpful editor, and the final 240 pages contain short biographies of every writer (or letter recipient) in the book, an informative chronology of events (and Bailyn makes sure readers have a perspective for the debates in this book by starting the chronology in 1774, some 13 years before the first words in this book were spoken), and competent notes on the text to help readers unfamiliar with some of the players or events keep everything sorted out.

Even though we all have the luxury of knowing that Everything Came Out All Right In The End -- the Constitution was ratified -- there is still quite a bit of drama here, particularly in the debates in the State Ratifying Conventions, which are carried out with suitable handwringing and bluster on both sides. Appropriately, then, the final piece in here is the dramatic speech the previously skeptical John Hancock delivered in the Massachusetts convention, informing his colleagues he would, indeed, vote for ratification. Hancock's words are as stirring now as they were then -- but I'll let you read them for yourself.

If you have the opportunity, purchase both Volume I and Volume II together. Not only will you get the complete debates (Volume I ends in February 1788; volume II is needed to make it to August), but you'll also get one of the Library of America's typically attractive slip-cases. It's a little more expensive, but worth it.

This is an excellent collection of essays dealing with, as the title suggests, the key people and ideas of the revolutionary period. It is extremely well-written and well-argued and draws upon a lifetime of scholarship.

His biographical vignettes flesh out the personal characteristics and ideas of key figures (great description of John Adams: "driven and uneasy"). Particularly interesting among these were the two lesser known figures: Thomas Hutchinson and the unknown Harbottle Dorr. The conservative (especially in temperament) Hutchinson found himself unable to respond to--effectively, if at all--or understand revolutionary ideas or motivations. Harbottle Dorr, who I suspect will never appear in a textbook, kept a fascinating collection of Boston newspapers, which he indexed and annotated throughout the period; his story is a deep insight into what was driving "regular" revolutionaries and how they were engaging the ideas of the time.

The thematic essays are also particularly good. "1776 in Britain and America: A Year of Challenge--A World Transformed" was especially enlightening. It places American events and ideas in the broader context of what was occurring in Britain; this annus mirabilis witnessed the publication not only of Paine's "Common Sense," but also Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Smith's "Wealth of Nations," and Bentham's "Fragment on Government," among several other lesser known works. This was a world in flux, with ubiquitous economic growth and a population explosion--as well as vast movements of people. Existing government structures were insufficient in dealing with these dramatic changes, and so new ideas and ideologies--building on previous authors, such as Locke--circulated to address the new problems. The other thematic essays, in some way or another, also attempt to place the ideas and themes in a broader perspective--either of the physical world or the world of ideas.

All in all, a great compilation of essays.

Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence written by Bernard Bailyn is a delightful and informative read as it examines the background, origins and character of the American Revolution, with leading and representative figures and issues of interpretation; making a balanced statement of preceived life events and motivations.

The author cleverly divides this book into twelve essays and these essays are divided into two major chapters. The first major division of essays is called Personalities. Personalities has essays on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hutchison, Thomas Paine and Harbottle Dorr. The last one I found to be of extreme interest as it looks at middle-income Americans at that time and how the American Revolution affected them. This was a real time-in-the-bottle look at how middle-income America looked at these times.

Also, this first section covers how religion played a part in the Revolution as three biographical sketches complete this section and here we have Andrew Eliot, Jonathan Mayhew and Stephen Johnson. Here in the first section, we find that there was nothing inevitable about the American Revolution and it did not need to happen. According to Benjamin Franklin the Revolution could be deflected (1772 or 1773). What was inevitable, was America's emergence into the modern world as a liberal. democratic and captialist society.

The second Section is called: Themes and the four essays contained here bring to the front ideological challenges and a society wanting change to home rule... but greater yet, who should rule at home. This book conveys something of the vividness of the personalities involved in the Revolution; to comment on some of the ways in which personalities and ideas intersected with circumstances and events, making an interesting read. This book shows the reader an essential spirit of eighteenth-century reform... its idealism and determination to protect the individual from the power of the state... something we cherish even today.

'All history is biography,' the saying goes, and while that may or may not be true in the absolute, it's certainly true that the best way to understand how 'movements' and 'forces' affect history is by studying the lives of the individuals who shape, and are shaped by, them.

Bernard Bailyn is one of our leading historians (maybe THE leading historian) on the American Revolution. His classic 'Ideological Origins of the American Revolution' casts a huge shadow, not least over this small but valuable collection of 'personalities and themes in the struggle for American independence.'

Here, Bailyn gives us in-depth portraits of patriots John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, as well as a fascinating portrayal of the loyalist Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, one of the leading Americans of his time but almost forgotten today. And he introduces us to Harbottle Dorr, a Boston shopkeeper whose writings give us a priceless look at how the Revolution affected middle-class Americans. Then, in a special chapter on religion and the Revolution, Bailyn writes about three preachers and their experience of, and influence on, the themes and issues of American independence.

The last two chapters, 'The Central Themes of the American Revolution,' and 'The Ideological Fulfillment of the American Revolution: A Commentary on the Constitution,' are alone worth the price of this volume.

History has no stage on which to play out its drama save in the lives of individuals (unless you're talking about geology or astrophysics, I guess, but why ruin a good epigram?). A student of the Revolution, or of intellectual history, would benefit much from this fine, though lesser-known, work of an excellent historian.

This brief book is the text of 3 lectures delivered by Bailyn in the late 1960s. The title is a little misleading, as it may lead readers to expect a description of the origins of our present political system. The book is actually concerned with how pre-Revolutionary politics generated the Revolution. Because of the format, Bailyn produced 3 concise analyses of key issues leading up to the American Revolution. The first lecture is essentially a summary of his superb "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution", describing the ideology of the Revolutionaries. The second lecture is a structural analysis of politics in the colonies demonstrating their common elements and causes of political turbulence in the colonies. The third lecture shows how the combination of this particular ideology, the unstable structure of colonial politics/governence, and the specific series of events in the mid-18th century set the stage for the revolution.
In lecture one, Bailyn describes the basic ideology of the Revolutionaries. The main element of this ideology was a set of political concepts inherited from the 17th century as transmitted and interpreted by 18th dissenting political theorists. This description is solid and very interesting but pales by comparison with the brilliant scholarship and analysis of Bailyn's book on this subject. In the second lecture, Bailyn provides an interesting structural analysis of why colonial politics were perpetually unstable. In all colonies, the formal structure of government was supposed to reproduce the constitutional structure of Britain with the governers as royal substitutes, appointed councils as equivalents of the House of Lords, and elected bodies as the equivalents of the Commons. What the Colonies lacked were the informal networks of deference and patronage that guaranteed stability in Britain. The broad franchise and lack of a native aristocracy made it impossible to reproduce the British model. Bailyn shows in the third lecture how British attempts to impose their will, an set of expectations based on the British experience, were resisted by the colonists. These conflicts were then interpreted as fundamental constitutional assaults because the prevailing ideology in the Colonies was the oppositional idea propagated by critics of the British state.
This brief and clearly written book provides an excellent scheme for understanding the genesis of the Revolution.

Bailyn complements furthers his study of 18th century America by examining the political history of the colonies. He spends ample time discussing the political environment of each colony, with a special eye on conflicts and controversies. A major theme throughout is the conflict between the elective houses of the legislatures and the Crown appointed office of Governor. He documents individual cases such John Peter Zenger's famous trial and the King's College crisis in New York. Lastly, he pays special attention to the ideological proclivities of Americans. He gives special attention to the pervasive influence of Trenchard and Gordon's magnificent "Cato's Letters," as well as the politicla writings of Lord Bolingbroke. Ultimately, it is a subtle and overly stimulating piece of scholarship. Highly recommended

This book, along with Bailyn;s masterpiece, "The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution," forms the perfect set for anyone interested in the ideas and history of 18th century America. In this volume, the origins of American political ideas and institutions are revealed with perfect lucidity. A fascinating read.

Although this work is basically a broad survey of the sources on early American education, Bailyn makes some important suggestions that ache to be brought full circle. He demonstrates how scholarship on this subject have been marred by a tendency to view everything in the light of a gradual progression to compulsory public education. He also notes how this has caused a large amount of distortions and myths to be created, with the result of quite near everyone making absurd and innance assumptions about the past. Moreover, the true nature of education in early education has been largely lost to the world, despite the fact that there are ample sources waiting to be exploited. This book should be especially fascinating to anti-public education libertarians, who, of course, view the growth of public education of the modern form as a serious regression in society. This work could serve as a starting point for a history taking up the libertarian point of view; an invaluable undertaking no doubt.

this is a brief but fascinating read. although it contains in itself a great deal of interesting material, it really makes you anxious to read the subsequent volume,"Voyagers To The West."

Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.
Surely one of the most important studies of the vast movement of immigrants to the New World is Bernard Bailyn's The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. In a nuanced thesis regarding the motivations for promoting movement of large numbers of people to the American wilderness, he also shows how long-held traditions with regard to land ownership and tenantry were transformed in America, due largely to the new environment. Bailyn argues that after the "initial phase of colonization, the major stimuli to population recruitment and settlement were...the continuing need for labor, and...land speculation." The land speculation of the 17th and 18th centuries, Bailyn argues, "shaped a relationship between the [land] owners and the workers of the land different from that which prevailed in Europe." (60) Bailyn writes that land speculation was common in America among all classes of men, "a major preoccupation of ambitious people...launched as a universal business." (67) But with all of this pervasive land accumulation came an indispensable caveat; speculators needed settlers to populate the land they claimed, so that an owner could rent or sell his property. "Land speculation was, and remained, boundless, ubiquitous," (74) writes Bailyn, who goes on to describe the various schemes and methods speculators used "to people the land they claimed." (69) Yet as Bailyn points also out, long-held, customary tenancy relationships that British landowners were used to were not adaptable to America. Instead, new methods were needed to attract settlers and clear the land, so that property in the trackless wilderness would become useable, and as a result, valuable. Bailyn argues that, unlike tenancy norms in Britain or Ireland, speculators had to let the land out at very low rates (or none at all) in an attempt to attract settlers who would in turn make improvements on the property themselves, with their own labor. "The land would have a new value and could then be rented profitably or sold...all of this with little or no outlay of funds." (82) This innovative model was quite attractive to migrants, Bailyn concludes, who were free to chose upon which speculator's land to settle, and which lands to avoid. In America, gone were the services tenants typically performed in the old country, rent increases and the caprice of landlords. Bailyn goes on to suggest as well that unlike property limitations in Britain, land in the colonies was "too easily available" and mobility too common among settlers for tenancy to develop permanently, or to "make possible a re-creation of the stable pattern of rentiers that lay at the heart of a traditional landed society." New tenancy and ownership patterns "reveal a new and dynamic process that was a central force in the peopling of America." (84-85)

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction writtin by Bernard Bailyn is a book that has three major essays about how North America was settled. These essays are: Worlds in Motion, The Rings of Saturn and A Domesday Book for the Periphery.

In these essays the author brings a new vividness and authenticity to the story of the settlement of North America as the Old World tranfers people to the New World... we see a basis for an American society begining to form... later a British migration solidifies a central theme where people wanted to control their own destiny.

The book is well-written and is documented giving the reader sharp detail. I found the book to be not only educational, but enlightening.

This is one fascinating book! I can't believe how successful Mr. Bailyn has been in making the demographics of British North America so interesting. Harvard's eminent historian has written a very lively, very well-researched, immensely entertaining work.

Being an historian in training myself, I find his examination of the elements of population history absolutely exemplary. Bailyn structures his magisterial two-volume study (to which this book is the introduction) around four "propositions" about socio-demographics in Britain's North American colonies. He subsequently answers these "queries" by offering a broad overview of his own research and the field in general.

Among the interesting ways he wished to enter into research was by stating his "propositions" and then assaying to fill them out. For instance, one section of the book is based on an imaginative "proposition": if an 18th-century British King had attempted to do what William the Conqueror did in the 11th century -- to conduct a survey and compile a "Domesday Book" about his realms -- what would he have found? What would have been the trends at work in the empire? How were Old World socio-economic forces intimately linked to the discovery and settlement of the New, not only in England, but also on the European continent? Bailyn carries out a penetrating examination of the great migrations in 17th-century England -- from North to South, from village to village, from the countryside to the city -- and then considers the extension of this process to North America. 250 years after this imaginary census, Bailyn's fascinating analysis is part of what makes "The Peopling of British North America" such a success: he unifies a century's historical research into a comprehensive whole.

Another "proposition" Bailyn outlines is this: how did the movement and interactions of populations in the New World affect the psychology of the colonists? In other words, what was migration's impact on mentality? How could civilization exist side-by-side with barbarism? Effete plantations with brutal frontiers? Old world with New? How, for example, could William Byrd of Westover, Virginia, lead the refined plantation lifestyle for which he is famous, reading his Bible and his classics in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew every day, the paragon of culture and English sobriety, and then turn around to beat his slaves for the most trivial offenses, which he subsequently records for us in his "Secret Diary" with not so much as the smallest regret? What do these trends say about the American character? How did they shape our basic institutions and the fundamentals of our history?

In short, you will not find a better book on the population of the American colonies than Mr. Bailyn's. While I have not yet read the succeeding two volumes in his work, I eagerly look forward to doing so. I trust they, too, are more shining examples this brilliant historian's outstanding scholarship.

Forty years ago, when I was squandering my education as a Harvard undergraduate, Bernard Bailyn was a rising star in that university's history department faculty. His immediate predecessor as the dean of Harvard's American studies scholars had been Perry Miller, an intellectual historian who, before his death in 1963, remade the study of American colonial history with his analyses of Puritan ideas gleaned largely from sermons. Indeed, American history and literature, on that campus at that time, was pretty much devoted to the study of big ideas, and not to the study of political, economic, or social events or movements or of artistic form.

Bailyn was one of a new generation of historians who sought out ship registers, merchant's accounting ledgers, estate inventories, and other quantifiable data series, previously ignored, to tell their stories of how, in the late colonial and early national periods, ordinary Americans made decisions of lasting significance. For the next 30 years the study of American history followed Bailyn's lead. Still, Bailyn himself never fully abandoned his grounding in intellectual history. His oeuvre, for example, includes the highly respected "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" and a study of pamphleteering in the revolutionary period.

With "To Begin the World Anew," Bailyn offers students of American history a thin book consisting of five essays reworked from speeches which he has given over several years. The essays are surely well-written, but they break no new ground. Readers who favor intellectual history may find them interesting enough. Readers who favor quantitative historical analysis will find them lacking.

Thus, for example, taking his cue from an essay by art historian Kenneth Clark, Bailyn writes that Jefferson, Franklin, and the other American "founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it -- comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations. . . . For many -- the ablest, best informed, and most ambitious -- the result was a degree of rootlessness, of alienation either from the higher sources of culture or from the familiar local environment. . . . But the effect of their provincialism ran deeper than that. As their identity as a separate people took form through the Revolutionary years they came to see that their remoteness from the metropolitan world gave them a moral advantage in politics." (31-34) I enjoyed Bailyn's discussion and photographs of revolutionary era mansions and portraiture, in England and America, which he uses to illustrate this point. For my taste, however, his concepts of "provincialism," "rootlessness," "alienation," and "moral advantage" (like his concepts of "realism" and "idealism" in foreign policy) are too amorphous, and the analysis too formulaic, to much rely upon.

I am undoubtedly still squandering that education, but I would suggest borrowing, and not buying, this book. Robert E. Olsen

Historical research of the highest quality is frequently driven by a determination to answer questions of compelling importance. That is especially true of this volume in which Bailyn offers five separate but related essays which, together, examine a theme which its subtitle suggests: the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders." In his Preface, Bailyn identifies two convictions which remain constant throughout all five chapters: that those founders were "truly creative people, and that their creative efforts, the generation-long enterprise that elevated these obscure people from their marginal world to the center of Western civilization, were full of inconsistencies, logical dilemmas, and unresolved problems."

With regard to questions of compelling importance, several can be summarized as follows:

1. Which ambiguities "beset" Jefferson's career? What were their nature and impact?

2. What is revealed by the "strange interplay between lofty idealism and cunning realism in Franklin's spectacular success in Paris"? Meanwhile, what can be learned from the interplay between Franklin and Adams?

3. What is the significance of the fact that the authors of the Federalist papers struggled to reconcile "the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought"? To what extent was such a reconciliation achieved?

These are indeed compelling questions, ones which probably need to be asked today as our nation struggles to decide what its appropriate role is in the global community. After I read this book but before I began to formulate this review, I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. In it, Stiglitz offers a heartfelt but rigorous examination of globalization, "the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies," asserting that it can and should be a force for good "and that it has the potential [in italics] to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor." However, given how globalization has been managed thus far, it should be rethought. Focusing primarily on the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) during the past decade, Stiglitz responds to the basic question: "Why has globalization -- a force that has brought so much good -- become so controversial?"

I had Stiglitz's book in mind as I re-read Bailyn's. Granted, no one knew in the late-eighteenth century that the coalition of thirteen colonies (if it achieved independence) would one day become the single most powerful nation in the world. For me, the single greatest benefit of Bailyn's is his analysis of the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders," how they created a foundation on which the original thirteen colonies evolved over more than two centuries into the 50 states and their federal government which now, during arguably the most volatile period since the 1770s, struggles to the support the natural rights of humanity by advocating and supporting what Jefferson once referred to as "the sacred fire of freedom and self-government" throughout the world. Challenges of various kinds will, of course, continue to present themselves. Bailyn duly acknowledges that reality while suggesting that "I think an equally important challenge is our own responsibility to probe the character of our constitutional establishment, as the eighteenth century provincials probed the establishment they faced, to recognize that for many in our own time and within our own culture, it has become scholastic in nits elaboration, self-absorbed, self-centered, and in significant ways distant from the ordinary facts of life."

Bailyn's brilliant examination of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders" is in essence an examination of the heritage of those founders, revealing the humanity of their talents and imperfections, to be sure, but also suggesting the standards of measurement by which we determine the extent to which we have proven worthy of that heritage.

Introspective and well-written essays by Bernard Bailyn, as we have come to expect. Though his work is always five-star, this one is a bit more slow and lecture-sounding than his previous scholarly works, and, curiously, attempts to countermand the lecturey characteristic with various types of iconography. If you come away liking that sort of thing, or like history that is less lecturey, after reading this wonderful work by Bernard Bailyn, I would recommend you also try Norman Thomas Remick's rendition of "beginning the world anew" called "West Point: Character Leadership Education..." which cleverly posits the foundation of West Point as a metaphor for the foundation of the United States of America and untangles the founders' deeds and philosophy, particularly Thomas Jefferson's.

Bernard Bailyn, brilliant historian, answers a series of questions at Dartmouth College while in residence there on the subject of writing and teaching history. To the average reader, this guide will be not be hard to read, but probably not very necessary unless there is an intent to teach undergraduate or graduate students in a small class setting or if research is in process to complete a larger work on history. The book contains practical knowledge for all history teachers and offers some very general assumtions that must be kept in mind whether teaching or reporting on history. Well written and constructed, but intended for the serious historian.

Someone had the inspired idea of having one of the greatest living historians take part in an interview on his craft and profession. The result, ably edited and presented by Edward Connery Latham, is one of the wisest and most accessible books ever written about writing history. Bailyn's work spans the range of historical scholarship, and he is perhaps the most influential historian of the second half of the twentieth century; the list of his graduate students that appeared in the 1991 collection of essays published in his honor is in turn an honor role of the nation's most creative, able, and productive historians.

I would recommend this book enthusiastically to anyone who is considering entering the historical profession or anyone who simply wants to understand what it is that historians do. The questions, by Professors Jere R. Danielle and Charles T. Wood of Dartmouth, are incisive and provocative, and Bailyn's answers are uniformly enlightening and engaging. Everyone having a role in the creation of this wonderful book is to be congratulated.

-- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School

I was assigned this book for AP U.S. History class and was excited to read a book that focused on the point of view of a loyalist during the pre-revolutionary era instead of the typical rebel point of view that we've studied in the past. I reccommend this book to anyone who likes alternative points of view on possibly controversial subjects. The only drawback, the reason I did not give it four or five stars, is that it gives a lot of facts from the era like specific act names. I don't deem these things important when trying to understand where a loyalist in this area is coming from.

I'll cheerfully agree with the reviewer below who claims that Bailyn's biography of Thomas Hutchinson, who was a fixture in Massachusetts politics for the last two decades of the colonial period and who was the loyalist governor of the province at the time of the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, presupposes a general knowledge of American Revolutionary History and the acts of Parliament which figured so prominently in it. In fact, I'll go a step further and say that one's enjoyment of this book would be greatly enhanced by reading two of Bailyn's other works which provide the scholarly framework for Bailyn's argument in this book: THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION and THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN POLITICS. Bailyn's central argument in this book is that Hutchinson, the prototypical Loyalist, failed because he could never conceptually understand the ideological underpinnings of his opponents' thought. He was convinced that a small group of demogogues motivated by base self-interest had managed to convince the populace at large that the British government was plotting against them and their God-given rights when it was clear to Hutchinson that all notions of a perfidious British plot were absolutely ridiculous. Unfortunately, Hutchinson's analysis of the situation was severely flawed, and Hutchinson's failure to understand his opponents made him incapable of convincing them that they were in error.

Bailyn is the foremost living historian of the American Revolution, and this book is what one would expect from someone of Bailyn's stature. It's wonderfully researched and wonderfully written, and it truly is a joy to read. It's not the first book that one should read about the American Revolution, but it's certainly on the list.